


Blue Milk and Toast

by Onehelluvapilot



Series: Afterwards [4]
Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Angst, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Nightmares, Poe Dameron Hurts So Prettily, Poe Dameron Needs A Hug, Poe-centric, Post-Star Wars: The Last Jedi, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Vomiting
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-24
Updated: 2018-02-24
Packaged: 2019-03-23 11:32:49
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,338
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13786737
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Onehelluvapilot/pseuds/Onehelluvapilot
Summary: Poe wakes up in the middle of the night,  and doesn't want to disturb anyone else. Unfortunately,  or perhaps fortunately for him,  pilots tend to be light sleepers.





	Blue Milk and Toast

Poe woke up with the taste of ash in his mouth. Ash, blood, and something else that when he realized what it was, he raced to the bathroom to puke. Burnt flesh. His legs wouldn't hold him, and he half collapsed against the toilet, retching between or perhaps because of the sobs that punched through his guts. He wasn't loud; he couldn't get enough air into his lungs to do more than cough weakly. It was the middle of the night, and if he looked up, he could have seen familiar stars through the skylight.

He heaved up and flushed away his dinner from a few hours earlier. It was no great loss. Rey had tried to cook by herself for the first time, and it ended with using the Force as a fire suppression system. The taste lingered, and the split second image of the burning hangar was burned in his brain. He sat back against the door of the fresher. His head fell back against the glass, so his face was tilted upwards, but his eyes were closed so he didn't see the lights above. Eventually his breathing evened out.

“Hey,” someone said softly. Poe startled, his heart returning to its too fast rate as he started to scramble to his feet. He relaxed a little and sat down again when he saw that it was just the young pilot Angelica. She was wearing a pair of his mom's old pajamas that had been tucked up into a closet for years. They were flannel, with little x-wings all over. One hand held a glass of milk, of the blue variety, and in the other was a plate with a slice of bread on it. “To get the taste out of your mouth,” she said, offering them out to him. He wondered how she knew before realizing she probably just meant the throw up, not the ash. “I was sick a lot as a kid, and this is what Mims always brought me.”

“Mims?” he asked. Why was that what he asked? There were more important questions. ‘Why are you up’ and ‘did I wake you’ among them.

“One of my moms. The quilter one.”

“Ah. Okay.”

“Do you think you can keep it down?” she asked, taking a slow step into the bathroom. It took him another second to realize she meant the food, not the volume level of being sick.

“Yeah. Thank you, Angelica. This is really kind.”

“No problem. Do you want me to stay here with you for a little while?”

“If you don't mind,” Poe said with a shy nod. Another human, another pilot, might just be the thing he needed, to remind him that not everyone had died. Just mostly everyone, and mostly because of him.

“So, hangover or stomach bug?” she asked as she sat down next to him, setting the dishes down between them.

“Neither. Nightmare,” he admitted.

“Must’ve been a bad one.” There was no judgement in her voice, just understanding. She had joined the Resistance just three months ago, and had grown up a lot in that time. Mostly since Crait. She wasn’t a stranger to bad dreams either. Leia shook her awake some nights from her pallet on the floor when she cried out.

“I can handle it,” he replied. Angelica complained about men under her breath until she realized all pilots were like that, regardless of gender and testosterone. Independent to the point of idiocy, stubborn as mules, and so proud. She knew he would have to get through this and over those things by himself, soon too, if he was going to be a leader, and nothing she could say would change that. But she was stubborn too, so Damn it but she was going to try.

“Yeah, because puking at three am in the bathroom is clearly handling it.”

“Well, some of that has to be blamed on dinner.” He loved Rey, she had saved him and the entire Resistance, and she was good at many things, but cooking was not one of them. Even his father's usually foolproof recipe had failed.

“Oh, so this is the first time this has happened then?”

“First time I've thrown up.” With luck it wouldn't become a regular occurrence. Hopefully he wasn't getting worse.

“And if I ask Finn how many times you've woken him up with tossing and turning or crying out from nightmares, what is he going to say?”

Poe got up suddenly, any trace of shaky disguised behind angry. He loomed a little above Angelica, who forced herself not to move. He wouldn't hurt her; he was just upset. Why had the thought that he was dangerous even come into her head? He wasn't like that. He tried to protect people, not do them damage. The broken one: not the one doing the breaking.

“What right did I give you to go snooping around in my life?” he demanded. “Just because you brought me kriffing... toast and milk doesn't mean you get to… I don't know, know everything about me.”

“Sorry,” the younger pilot apologized, dipping her head differentially. That seemed to pacify her superior. Poe rubbed a hand over his face, instantly ashamed of his outburst.

“No, I'm sorry,” he said, sitting back down again. “I shouldn't have snapped.” He'd been working on his temper. Three in the morning with the taste of barf in his mouth and his heart still racing seemed to be a bit too advanced of a test. His head ached, and pinching the bridge of his nose didn't help much. “I know you're just… you're just trying to help, and I'm not making it easy.”

Angelica let him sit in silence for a moment. His near shouting hadn't seemed to have woken anyone, as there was not a peep from the rest of the house.

“It's hard not to be concerned when you hear retching in the middle of the night,” she said eventually.

“Sorry,” the man said morosely.

“You know, Mims used to say don't be sorry, be better. And I know that you can't just get better, that you can't will away nightmares, because, believe me, we'd all be sleeping a lot better if that was true, but I think it still applies here. Just let yourself take help when it's offered okay? No more apologies.”

“I'll try. I'm trying, to be better.” He sighed. “Which probably starts with getting some sleep so I'm not completely dead on my feet tomorrow.”

“That sounds like a good idea,” Angelica agreed, getting gingerly to her feet. “Drink your milk. It's got tryptophan in it, help you sleep.”

He quickly gave himself a milk mustache as he drained the glass, and then nodded very somberly, drawing an ugly snorted laugh from Angelica. He wiped the residue away with the toast before speaking, so she would actually take him seriously.

“Thank you. And same goes the other way too. If you ever need anything, be it toast or someone to talk to, come to me, alright? Don’t worry about it being too small.”

“Okay,” she agreed, and left. The older pilot ate his toast, drank his milk, and, eventually hid the plate and glass under the sink and slunk back off into the bedroom. Finn these days alternated between sleeping out with Rey in the yard, on the bed with Rose, or on the floor with Poe. Tonight he was on the floor. Apparently he had rolled over while the other man had been gone, and now his arm was over where he had been lying. The soldier was a heavy sleeper. He didn’t react when the commander lifted up the limb and slipped in underneath it. In the morning, the young man would probably just think he had rolled over against his commander, not that the other man had sought out the contact. The hand fell back down between his shoulder blades, and with that comfortable weight and the help of the milk Poe Dameron fell back asleep.

**Author's Note:**

> Love comments


End file.
